Some links
Sunday, February 7th, 2010 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmian1. An interview with Matt Haughey, the creator of Metafilter, which, though it started out as a hobby, has enabled him to quit his day job and pay three employees.
The site's revenue model is not based off of membership fees (although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size), but off of advertisements, mostly in the AskMefi section. Members don't see ads, but people who stumble in via search engine or external links do.
2. In Praise of Online Obscurity
On how socializing doesn't scale.
"Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote....At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."
The site's revenue model is not based off of membership fees (although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size), but off of advertisements, mostly in the AskMefi section. Members don't see ads, but people who stumble in via search engine or external links do.
2. In Praise of Online Obscurity
On how socializing doesn't scale.
"Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote....At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."
no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 04:42 am (UTC)I did on LJ, but I didn't use them much. On the other hand, I'd say a lot of the time I was working out of a broadcast model anyway.
Hmm, so since feedback was harder and lurkers had a harder time speaking, the illusion of obscurity could be much better maintained. Yeah, with the internet having grown exponentially over the past ten years, it would in fact be odd if social norms/mores had not changed.